Pwn Up: PokéMath

Every now and then, we get a such big and thorough entry submitted to us, that we have absolutely no choice but to run it as its own very special edition of Pwn Up. This is one of those times.

Recently, you had an article about The 10 Most Absurdly Powerful Pokemon In Existence, and I was particularly interested by your account of Machamp. By two different pokedex entries, Machamps are shown to be capable of moving mountains with just one arm, and throwing 500 punches per second. I (like any normal high schooler would) decided to calculate how much kinetic energy just one of these punches would have...

The average height of a mountain is 4000 meters, and I estimated the radius at 1500 meters. Using the cone volume formula, I approximated the volume of the average mountain at 9,424,777,961 cubic meters. One cubic meter of a mountain will have a mass of around 2700 kilograms, so I found the mass of this average mountain to be 2.5447*10^13 kilograms.

Now, a Machamp has an average height of 1.6 meters, and given that a wingspan is roughly equal to height, I estimated his arm length to be about .6 meters (subtracting out chest half-width). For each punch, his arm is moving forwards to full extension, and then backwards to the starting point and about .2 meters more. So that leaves me with 1.4 as the rough estimation of the distance traveled by his arm, and then 1/125 of a second as the time taken to do so (500/4=125 punches per second from one arm). Using the kinetic energy formula, this leaves just one punch from a Machamp at 3.8966*10^17 joules of energy, which is worth about 93130302.94 tons of TNT. Apparently, he can do 500 of those per second.

It astonishes me that I have a girlfriend.

-Robert H.

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